Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Why do I say that?" said the man, getting up finally and putting his stick in his pocket. "Why do I say that? Because they go there for the pleasure of being cheated out of their last penny. The meat is just horsemeat, you know. This size and it ain't red. It's a kind of gray, without a sign of a potato near it, and it costs plenty too. They're all as poor as church mice besides, without a single ounce of knowledge about life in the whole crowd of them. Like a lot of dogs straining at the leash."

  "And then they all go together to Pig Snout's Hook every single night?"

  "I don't know when they go to Pig Snout's Hook," said the man, "any more than I know what cockroaches are doing every night."

  "Well, what's so wrong about Pig Snout's Hook?" Miss Goering asked him.

  "There's one thing wrong," said the man growing more and more interested, "and that's that they've got a nigger there that jumps up and down in front of a mirror in his room all day long until he sweats and then he does the same thing in front of these lads and lassies and they think he's playing them music. He's got an expensive instrument all right, because I know where he bought it and I'm not saying whether or not he paid for it, but I know he sticks it in his mouth and then starts moving around with his long arms like the arms of a spider and they just won't listen to nothin' else but him."

  "Well," said Miss Goering, "certain people do like that type of music."

  "Yes," said the man, "certain people do like that type of music and there are people who live together and eat at table together stark naked all the year long and there are others who we both know about"—he looked very mysterious—"but," he continued, "in my day money was worth a pound of sugar or butter or lard any time. When we went out we got what we paid for plus a dog jumpin' through burning hoops, and steaks you could rest your chin on."

  "What do you mean?" asked Miss Goering—"a dog jumping through burning hoops?"

  "Well," said the man, "you can train them to do anything with years of real patience and perseverance and lots of headaches too. You get a hoop and you light it all around and these poodles, if they're the real thing, will leap through them like birds flying in the air. Of course it's a rare thing to see them doing this, but they've been right here in this town flying right through the centers of burning hoops. Of course people were older then and they cared for their money better and they didn't want to see a black jumping up and down. They would rather prefer to put a new roof on their house." He laughed.

  "Well," said Miss Goering, "did this go on in a cabaret that was situated where the Pig Snout's Hook place is now situated? You understand what I mean."

  "It surely didn't!" said the man vehemently. "The place was situated right on this side of the river in a real theater with three different prices for the seats and a show every night and three times a week in the afternoon."

  "Well, then," said Miss Goering, "that's quite a different thing isn't it? Because, after all, Pig Snout's Hook is a cabaret, as you said yourself a little while ago, and this place where the poodles jumped through the burning hoops was a theater, so in actuality there is really no point of comparison."

  The old man knelt down again and continued to pry the nails from the boards by placing his little stick between the head of the nail and the wood.

  Miss Goering did not know what to say to him, but she felt that it was pleasanter to go on talking than to start off down the main street alone. She could tell that he was a little annoyed, so that she was prepared to ask her next question in a considerably softer voice.

  "Tell me," she said to him, "is that place at all dangerous, or is it merely a waste of time."

  "Surely, it's as dangerous as you want," said the old man immediately, and his ill humor seemed to have passed. "Certainly it's dangerous. There are some Italians running it and the place is surrounded by fields and woods." He looked at her as if to say: "That is all you need to know, isn't it?"

  Miss Goering for an instant felt that he was an authority and she in turn looked into his eyes very seriously. "But can't you," she asked, "can't you tell very easily whether or not they have all returned safely? After all, you have only if necessary to stand at the top of the hill and watch them disembark, from the ferry." The old man picked up his stick once more and took Miss Goering by the arm.

  "Come with me," he said, "and be convinced once and for all." He took her to the edge of the hill and they looked down the brightly lighted street that led to the dock. The ferry was not there, but the man who sold the tickets was clearly visible in his booth, and the rope with which they moored the ferry to the post, and even the opposite shore. Miss Goering took in the entire scene with a clear eye and waited anxiously for what the old man was about to say.

  "Well," said the old man, lifting his arm and making a vague gesture which included the river and the sky, "you can see where it is impossible to know anything." Miss Goering looked around her and it seemed to her that there could be nothing hidden from their eyes, but at the same time she believed what the old man said to her. She felt both ashamed and uneasy.

  "Come along," said Miss Goering, "I'll invite you to a beer."

  "Thank you very much, ma'am," said the old man. His tone had changed to that of a servant, and Miss Goering felt even more ashamed of having believed what he had told her.

  "Is there any particular place that you would like to go?" she asked him.

  "No, ma'am," he said, shuffling along beside her. He no longer seemed in the least inclined to talk.

  There was no one walking along the main street except Miss Goering and the old man. They did pass a car parked in front of a dark store. Two people were smoking on the front seat.

  The old man stopped in front of the window of a bar and grill and stood looking at some turkey and some old sausages which were on display.

  "Shall we go in here and have something to eat with our little drink?" Miss Goering asked him.

  "I'm not hungry," the man said, "but I'll go in with you and sit down."

  Miss Goering was disappointed because he didn't seem to have any sense of how to give even the slightest festive air to the evening. The bar was dark, but festooned here and there with crepe paper. "In honor of some recent holiday, no doubt," thought Miss Goering. There was a particularly nice garland of bright green paper flowers strung up along the entire length of the mirror behind the bar. The room was furnished with eight or nine tables, each one enclosed in a dark brown booth.

  Miss Goering and the old man seated themselves at the bar.

  "By the way," said the old man to her, "wouldn't you like better to seat yourself at a table where you ain't so much in view?"

  "No," said Miss Goering, "I think this is very, very pleasant indeed. Now order what you want, will you?"

  "I will have," said the man, "a sandwich of turkey and a sandwich of pork, a cup of coffee, and a drink of rye whisky."

  "What a curious psychology!" thought Miss Goering. "I should think he would be embarrassed after just having finished saying that he wasn't hungry."

  She looked over her shoulder out of curiosity and noticed that behind her in a booth were seated a boy and a girl. The boy was reading a newspaper. He was drinking nothing. The girl was sipping at a very nice cherry-colored drink through a straw. Miss Goering ordered herself two gins in succession, and when she had finished these she turned around and looked at the girl again. The girl seemed to have been expecting this because she already had her face turned in Miss Goering's direction. She smiled softly at Miss Goering and opened her eyes wide. They were very dark. The whites of her eyes, Miss Goering noticed, were shot with yellow. Her hair was black and wiry and stood way out all over her head.

  "Jewish, Rumanian, or Italian," Miss Goering said to herself. The boy did not lift his eyes from his newspaper, which he held in such a way that his profile was hidden.

  "Having a nice time?" the girl asked Miss Goering in a husky voice.

  "Well," said Miss Goering, "it wasn't exactly
in order to have a good time that I came out. I have more or less forced myself to, simply because I despise going out in the night-time alone and prefer not to leave my own house. However, it has come to such a point that I am forcing myself to make these little excursions—"

  Miss Goering stopped because she actually did not know how she could go on and explain to this girl what she meant without talking a very long time indeed, and she realized that this would be impossible right at that moment, since the waiter was constantly walking back and forth between the bar and the young people's booth.

  "Anyway," said Miss Goering, "I certainly think it does no harm to relax a bit and have a lovely time."

  "Everyone must have a wonderfully marvelous time," said the girl, and Miss Goering noticed that there was a trace of an accent in her speech. "Isn't that true, my angel Pussycat?" she said to the boy.

  The boy put his newspaper down; he looked rather annoyed. "Isn't what true?" he asked her. "I didn't hear a word that you said." Miss Goering knew perfectly well that this was a lie and that he was only pretending not to have noticed that his girl friend had been speaking with her.

  "Nothing very important, really," she said, looking tenderly into his eyes. "This lady here was saying that after all it did nobody any harm to relax and have a lovely time."

  "Perhaps," said the boy, "it does more harm than anything else to date to have a lovely time." He said this straight to the girl and completely ignored the fact that Miss Goering had been mentioned at all. The girl leaned way over and whispered into his ear.

  "Darling," she said, "something terrible has happened to that woman. I feel it in my heart. Please don't be bad-tempered with her."

  "With whom?" the boy asked her.

  She laughed because she knew there was nothing else much that she could do. The boy was subject to bad moods, but she loved him and was able to put up with almost anything.

  The old man who had come with Miss Goering had excused himself and had taken his drinks and sandwiches over to a radio, where he was now standing with his ear close to the box.

  Away in the back of the room a man was bowling up a small alley all by himself; Miss Goering listened to the rumble of the balls as they rolled along the wooden runway, and she wished that she were able to see him so that she could be at peace for the evening with the certainty that there was no one who could be considered a menace present in the room. Certainly there was a possibility that more clients would enter through the door, but this had entirely slipped her mind. Hard though she tried, it was impossible for her to get a look at the man who was rolling the balls.

  The young boy and the girl were having a fight. Miss Goering could tell by the sound of their voices. She listened to them carefully without turning her head.

  "I don't see why," said the girl, "that you must be furious immediately just because I have mentioned that I always like to come in here and sit for a little while."

  "There is absolutely no reason," said the boy, "why you should want to come in here and sit more than in any other place."

  "Then why—then why do you come in?" the girl asked hesitantly.

  "I don't know," said the boy; "maybe because it's the first thing we hit after we leave our room."

  "No," said the girl, "there are other places. I wish you would just say that you liked it here; I don't know why, but it would make me so happy; we've been coming here for a long time."

  "I'll be God-damned if I'll say it, and I'll be God-damned if I'll come here any more if you're going to invest this place with witches' powers."

  "Oh, Pussycat," said the girl, and there was real anguish in her tone, "Pussycat, I am not talking about witches and their powers; not even thinking about them. Only when I was a little girl. I should never have told you the story."

  The boy shook his head back and forth; he was disgusted with her.

  "For God's sake," he said, "that isn't anything near what I mean, Bernice."

  "I do not understand what you mean," said Bernice. "Many people come into this place or some other place every night for years and years and without doing much but having ä drink and talking to each other; it is only because it is like home to them. And we come here only because it is little by little becoming a home to us; a second home if you can call our little room a home; it is to me; I love it very much."

  The boy groaned with discontent.

  "And," she added, feeling that her words and her tone of voice could not help working a spell over the boy, "the tables and the chairs and the walls here have now become like the familiar faces of old friends."

  "What old friends?" said the boy, scowling more and more furiously, "What old friends? To me this is just another shit-house where poor people imbibe spirits in order to forget the state of their income, which is non-existent."

  He sat up very straight and glared at Bernice.

  "I guess that is true, in a way," she said vaguely, "but I feel that there is something more."

  "That's just the trouble."

  Meanwhile Frank, the bartender, had been listening to Bernice's conversation with Dick. It was a dull night and the more he thought about what the boy had said, the angrier he felt. He decided to go over to the table and start a row.

  "Come on, Dick," he said, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt. "If that's the way you feel about this place, get the hell out of here." He yanked him out of his seat and gave him a terrific shove so that Dick staggered a few steps and fell headlong over the bar.

  "You big fat-head," Dick yelled at the bartender, lunging out at him. "You hunk of retrogressive lard. I'll push your white face in for you."

  The two were now fighting very hard. Bernice was standing on the table and pulling at the shirts of the fighters in an attempt to separate them. She was able to reach them even when they were quite a distance from the table because the benches terminated in posts at either end, and by grabbing hold of one of them she could swing out over the heads of the fighters.

  Miss Goering, from where she was now standing, could see the flesh above Bernice's stocking whenever she leaned particularly far out of her booth. This would not have troubled her so much had she not noticed that the man who had been rolling the wooden balls had now moved away from his post and was staring quite fixedly at Bernice's bare flesh wherever the occasion presented itself. The man had a narrow red face, a pinched and somewhat inflamed nose, and very thin lips. His hair was almost orange in color. Miss Goering could not decide whether he was of an exceedingly upright character or of a criminal nature, but the intensity of his attitude almost scared her to death. Nor was it even possible for Miss Goering to decide whether he was looking at Bernice with interest or with scorn.

  Although he was getting in some good punches and his face was streaming with sweat, Frank the bartender appeared to be very calm and it seemed to Miss Goering that he was losing interest in the fight and that actually the only really tense person in the room was the man who was standing behind her.

  Soon Frank had a split lip and Dick a bloody nose. Very shortly after this they both stopped fighting and walked unsteadily towards the washroom. Bernice jumped off the table and ran after them.

  They returned in a few minutes, all washed and combed and holding dirty handkerchiefs to their mouths. Miss Goering walked up to them and took hold of each man by the arm.

  "I'm glad that it's all over now, and I want each of you to have a drink as my guest,"

  Dick looked very sad now and very subdued. He nodded his head solemnly and they sat down together and waited for Frank to fix them their drinks. He returned with their drinks, and after he had served them, he too seated himself at the table. They all drank in silence for a little while. Frank was dreamy and seemed to be thinking of very personal things that had nothing to do with the events of the evening. Once he took out an address book and looked through its pages several times. It was Miss Goering who first broke the silence.

  "Now tell me," she said to Bernice and Dick," "tell me what you are
interested in."

  "I'm interested in the political struggle," said Dick, "which is of course the only thing that any self-respecting human being could be interested in. I am also on the winning side and on the right side. The side that believes in the redistribution of capital." He chuckled to himself and it was very easy to tell that he thought he was conversing with a complete fool.

  "I've heard all about that," said Miss Goering. "And what are you interested in?" she asked the girl.

  "Anything he is interested in, but it is true that I had believed the political struggle was very important before I met him. You see, I have a different nature than he has. What makes me happy I seem to catch out of the sky with both hands; I only hold whatever it is that I love because that is all I can really see. The world interferes with me and my happiness, but I never interfere with the world except now since I am with Dick.." Bernice put her hand out on the table for Dick to take hold of it. She was already a little drunk.

  "It makes me sad to hear you talk like this," said Dick. "You, as a leftist, know perfectly well that before we fight for our own happiness we must fight for something else. We are living in a period when personal happiness means very little because the individual has very few moments left. It is wise to destroy yourself first; at least to keep only that part of you which can be of use to a big group of people. If you don't do this you lose sight of objective reality and so forth, and you fall plunk into the middle of a mysticism which right now would be a waste of time."

  "You are right, darling Dickie," said Bernice, "but sometimes I would love to be waited on in a beautiful room. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be a bourgeois." (She said the word "bourgeois," Miss Goering noticed, as though she had just learned it.) Bernice continued: "I am such a human person. Even though I am poor I will miss the same things that they do, because sometimes at night the fact that they are sleeping in their houses with security, instead of making me angry, fills me with peace like a child who is scared at night likes to hear grown people talking down in the street. Don't you think there is some sense in what I say, Dickie?"